Bulworth: the Hip-Hop Nation Confronts Corporate Capitalism a Review Essay

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 8 (1998) : 73-80. Bulworth: The Hip-Hop Nation Confronts Corporate Capitalism A Review Essay James Allen and Lawrence Goodheart Co-written, directed by, and starring Warren Beatty, Bulworth (1998) is a scathing political satire that ranks with Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963). While Kubrick skewered assumptions about nuclear strategy at the height of the Cold War, Beatty indicts the current corporate manipulation of American politics. Bulworth challenges the reigning capitalist mystique through a tragi- comedy that blends manifesto with farce and the serious with slapstick, in a format that is as enlightening as it is entertaining. The film is a mix of genres and stereotypes, common to mass-marketed movies, that Beatty nonetheless recasts into a radical message. He calls for democratic socialism and heralds the black urban underclass as its vanguard in a manner reminiscent of Herbert Marcuse’s formulation of a generation ago. The opening scene of Bulworth establishes what Beatty sees as the fundamental malaise of American politics today—that the rich rule the republic. The eponymous protagonist, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, played by Beatty himself, is the case in point. The incumbent Democratic senator from California has cynically abandoned his former liberal principals in the wake of the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s that marked the demise of the New Deal legacy. Even his pompous three-part name suggests not only a prominent pedigree but also a pandering politician, one full of “bull.” During the last days of the 1996 primary campaign, Bulworth suffers a crisis of faith in his bid for renomination. As the camera pans the wall of his elegantly appointed office at the Capitol, photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X shaking hands, Rosa Parks, Huey Newton, Robert Kennedy, and a younger, idealistic Bulworth appear. The radical promise of the 1960s is contrasted with the vacuous words of his generic campaign speech— “We stand at the doorstep of a new millennium . .” Bulworth’s hollow rhetoric rings reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s own over-used cliché of “building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” Indeed, the film attacks the Democratic Party’s recent rightward drift. Like Clinton, Bulworth’s knee-jerk criticism of affirmative action, welfare, and the national government play on the platitude that what is needed is “a hand up, not a hand out.” The empty rhetoric is that of pollsters, publicists, and pundits that caters to the new conservative majority. The “triangulation” of policy—the midpoint between Democrats and Republicans—that consultant Dick Morris shrewdly plotted for Clinton is the geometry of power. Agonized by moral hypocrisy, a tearful Bulworth remains rooted to his desk chair, unable to eat or sleep for days. In a McLuhanesque moment, the medium becomes the message. The senator is reduced to channel surfing between hypnotic images of his superficial speech, naked women, professional wrestling, and other Pavlovian diversions. What Newton Minon, the former Federal Communications Commissioner, called the “wasteland of television” is a modern day bread and circus, an opiate of bourgeois culture. “I consume, therefore I am.” Image is reality. The suave, handsome Beatty plays on his own persona in portraying the linkage between politician and actor, Washington and Hollywood, that Ronald Reagan so effectively blurred. Beatty at once warns and beckons. What the voter sees is not what he gets; politics is artifice. For example, Bulworth and his ironically named wife, Constance, appear for the inevitable “family values” photo-opportunity. The depiction of the handsome, loving couple is, however, fraudulent, not unlike the troubled marriages of John and Jackie Kennedy, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Their teen-age daughter refuses to participate; Bulworth is oblivious to his spouse; and she is sleeping with his opponent. In despair and desperate, Bulworth hires a mobster to arrange his assassination, which is code named “the weekend research project.” He also makes a contract with a corrupt lobbyist to block insurance reform in return for a $10,000,000 policy on his life payable to his daughter. The mobster, a hitman with feelings, is confused; the lobbyist, the truly nefarious character, is gleeful. A gangster genre is added to the theme of spiritual angst with invigorating effect on the story. The didacticism of the movie is leavened by the conventional spectacle of a mystery replete with mistaken identity, car chases, femme fatale, and suprise ending. Through the last weekend of the California primary, Bulworth not only is dogged by his own disgust with sham politics but fearful of being killed. The macabre humor works well as his aides, Murphy and Feldman, the quintessential Irish and Jewish politicos, try to give Bulworth’s outrageous behavior the correct “spin.” Oliver Platt’s riveting performance of the cocaine-snorting Murphy is a model of modern Machiavellianism. At Grace A.M.E. Church in South Central Los Angeles, a distraught Bulworth abruptly cuts short his prepared address and tells the parishioners the truth. African Americans don’t vote enough or contribute much money to the parties, and that’s why Democrats don’t care about blacks any more than Republicans do. Besides, whites don’t like the way blacks supported O.J. Simpson in the trial in which he was acquitted of murdering his white wife. Pleased with his blunt honesty, Bulworth remarks to himself, “That was good, really good.” Appropriately his repentance and regeneration begin in the black church, a center of social activism since slave times. Despite the recognition of the severe problems of the ghetto, the movie celebrates the vitality of black urban culture. Much to the consternation of Bulworth’s handlers, three young women from the inner-city, including the alluring Nina (played by Halle Berry), join his entourage. After the newly honest Bulworth outrages Jewish moguls in Beverly Hills and affluent Protestants in Pasadena, Nina guides Bulworth’s odyssey through the netherworld of Los Angeles. At Jackie’s, an after-hours club, Bulworth is misidentified as first Clint Eastwood and then George Hamilton. The confusion is not only a wry comment on celebrity culture, but on the racial generalization that members of the other group look alike—“can’t tell them apart.” The scene further reflects the large disconnection between the inner-city club-goers and the politicians in power. Bulworth’s time and energy have always been spent with the rich in Beverly Hills. As a result, he is alienated from the plight of the ghetto. In turn, inner-city residents are divorced from their senator, because they lack money and therefore a political voice. Unfazed, the liberated Bulworth enthusiastically joins in the Dionysian ecstasy of song, dance, and intoxication. Amidst the company of virile men and sensual women, he is miraculously transformed from a duplicitous politician into a rapping home boy. As Murphy remarks in consternation, “The Senator is rhyming!” Bulworth has become the hipster, what Norman Mailer hailed during the 1950s as the “white Negro.” The viewer feels that, removed from his political world of wealth, power, and obsession with image, Bulworth the club-goer is finally able to act as he pleases, rather than as the puppet of the moneyed elite. His shift reflects not only the rebirth of his social conscience, but his own personal rebirth. Much of the hilarity and iconoclasm of the movie comes from standing the normal order of things on its head, the world turned upside down. Bulworth’s fascination with the pulsating hip-hop scene, embodied by the seductive Nina, plays with the stereotypes of excessive black sexuality. The movie suggests, however, that African-Americans have long served as the cultural repository of whites’ repressed fears and projected fantasies, including Bulworth’s and the viewers’. Indeed Beatty makes fun of his own public reputation as a lover (including partners ranging from Julie Christie during the 1960s to Madonna in the 1990s, among numerous others). When the opportunity to consummate his relationship with Nina finally arrives, the exhausted Bulworth instead falls asleep, snoring loudly. Bulworth’s tense encounter with Nina’s protective brother Darnell is punctuated with a Derrida-like deconstruction of the epithet “nigger.” What had been the word that encapsulated white supremacy and black subordination—the intended dehumanization and objectification of slavery and Jim Crow—has been reappropriated by the victim as a symbol of defiance and resistance, particularly in rap music. The encounter is brief but instructive: the word is still fraught with explosive meaning; the context in which it is used and by whom is all important. When Nina bolsters Bulworth’s confidence with the words, “You’re my nigger,” she expresses romantic endearment as well as racial solidarity. Bulworth’s adventures in the ’hood further expose de facto racial segregation, especially the distance of the white middle class from the black underclass as well as that of politicians from the people. The Kerner Commission’s jeremiad in 1968 that the United States was two separate societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal, remains, as it has for centuries, the country’s central contradiction. In a mock professorial tone, the twenty-six-year-old Nina, whose parents were Black Panthers, lectures the sixty-year-old Bulworth on how the erosion of the manufacturing sector and the export of jobs through free trade policy has devastated the black worker and weakened black leadership. L.D., the South Central gangster, explains the drug epidemic and violence in his community, which he exploits as a “cutting-edge entrepreneur,” in terms of economic erosion and family breakdown. The concept of entrepreneurship highlights a major American contradiction.

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